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theodp writes "In its just-published patent application for Adapting Parasites to Combat Disease, Microsoft lays out plans to unleash 'altered parasitic organisms' on humans, including mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, bed bugs, leeches, pinworms, tapeworms, hookworms, heart worms, roundworms, lice (head, body, and pubic), and the like. 'Irradiated mosquitoes can be used to deliver damaged Plasmodium to individuals,' explains Microsoft. 'Instead of contracting malaria, an individual receiving the damaged Plasmodium develops an immune response that renders the individual resistant to contracting malaria.' Don't worry about runaway breeding, advises Microsoft — 'a termination feature [that] can include programmed death' makes this impossible. As David Spade might say, I liked this movie the first time I saw it — when it was called Jurassic Park."

Organizations like SBRI [seattlebiomed.org] are doing really interesting work on genetically attenuated malaria vaccines [malariavaccine.org], and the research isn't as scary as TFS makes it out to be (e.g. comparing it to Jurassic Park). (Here's a detailed slideshow [who.int] if you want to know the specifics.) The "runaway breeding" the article alludes to is ridiculous — we already have "runaway breeding" of anopheles mosquitoes, and as a result malaria kills a million or more persons per year, mostly in poor countries. The main issue with malaria vaccines is not "runaway breeding," but that eventually mutations may render the vaccine ineffective.

My main question here is: why is Microsoft filing for these patents? They have been involved in biomedics, afaik, only on the software and infomatics side [google.com]. Bill Gates, through his foundation, is generously giving grants [nytimes.com] to many organizations doing promising research. I didn't realize that Microsoft was directly involved in the research side of things. Did they buy assignment rights to this research (and potential patent)? Develop it themselves? That, I think, is the bigger story for me — not that this patent has been filed for, but that it's MSFT that is the assignee.

My main question here is: why is Microsoft filing for these patents? They have been involved in biomedics, afaik, only on the software and infomatics side.

Remember how you can lose your farm because some Monsanto-patented seed blows onto your property? Just wait until you lose your right to sue a pharmaceutical company because "somehow" their patented pharmaceuticals have left traces in your system. You don't get immunizations from the Gates foundation unless you provide patent protection to Big Pharma that may impair your ability to legally care for your people later. The B&M Gates foundation is just the latest tool for controlling the poorer nations. Ask yourself why the DoJ under John Ashcroft waved off the campaign against Microsoft after finding that they had illegally abused their monopoly position as long as they could be said to have had one, which is a long time indeed.

Develop it themselves? That, I think, is the bigger story for me -- not that this patent has been filed for, but that it's MSFT that is the assignee.

If you like that, you're going to love reading up on Microsoft patents on equipment to read and write DNA like a magtape.

"In a landmark victory for corporations heavily invested in genetically engineered foods, on March 29 a Canadian judge ruled that farmer Percy Schmeiser of Bruno, Saskatchewan must pay $105,000 to Monsanto for illegally growing the company's genetically engineered rapeseed, from which canola oil is made. But Schmeiser says he never planted Monsanto's seeds. "How can somebody put anything on someone else's land, then claim it's theirs and say, 'We'll take it. We'll sue him. We'll fine him'?" he as

"In a landmark victory for corporations heavily invested in genetically engineered foods, on March 29 a Canadian judge ruled that farmer Percy Schmeiser of Bruno, Saskatchewan must pay $105,000 to Monsanto for illegally growing the company's genetically engineered rapeseed, from which canola oil is made. But Schmeiser says he never planted Monsanto's seeds. "How can somebody put anything on someone else's land, then claim it's theirs and say, 'We'll take it. We'll sue him. We'll fine him'?" he asks."

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Food/Bad_Seeds.html

This is going to become the McDonald's Hot Coffee case of agriculture, I can tell. The facts are that the farmer recognized that some of his crop was contaminated with Monsanto's strain. Instead of complaining then, or suing Monsanto then, he harvested the seed and replanted it widely on his farm. He knew what he was doing. He was hoping it was finders, keepers. The court did not agree.

Agreed. He was using Round Up on those crops.. a pesticide that kills unmodified crops, demonstrating that he knew what he was doing.

It is the use of Round Up on Round Up Ready crops which is what the patent describes and what the farmer was violating.

If he had been just growing Round Up Ready crops without the use of Round Up he wouldn't have been violating the patent. If he had been just using Round Up to kill weeds then he wouldn't have been violating the patent. It's really simple. The only reason I can understand why people have trouble understanding this is just self induced ignorance.

It demonstrates that he was aware that the strains he had been developing had acquired a round-up resistance trait, as have any number of weed species growing wild alongside roads in many places where canola is grown. It does NOT demonstrate that he believed the trait to come from Monsanto's strain. That is, the djinn is out of the bottle. Monsanto has irrevocably polluted the genome. I would think that at the very least warrants revocation of their patent.

oh God. Seriously, you believe that? You think the farmer did careful studies of all the available pesticides and Round Up just happened to be the one that worked on his "special" crops so he decided to go with it? Are you kidding?

The finding of the court was that anyone using Round Up on Round Up Ready crops is exercising the patent. It doesn't matter how they got the Round Up or the Round Up Ready crops. This is entirely consistent with the history of patent infringement. It doesn't matter if you in

No, I think he happened to discover the roundup resistance when he tried the perfectly normal procedure of applying roundup in the places he didn't want the canola to grow and some of it just kept growing.

Note that Monsanto is in the habit of suing any farmer that has a crop that resists roundup at all, even if they do not use roundup. They claim the gene and any plant containing it is theirs.

They have repeatedly claimed that cross contamination with neighboring fields cannot happen. The fact that there are now weeds with the trait brings that into question.

The finding of the court was that anyone using Round Up on Round Up Ready crops is exercising the patent. It doesn't matter how they got the Round Up or the Round Up Ready crops. This is entirely consistent with the history of patent infringement. It doesn't matter if you independently discover the covered technique, you're still violating the patent if you exercise it.

It also violates the principles that have served agriculture well for centuries. Carried to it's natural conclusion, it will eventually hand ownership of nature itself over to corporate interests (or at least so surround it in a thicket of patents that they might as well own it).

The courts may say otherwise, but it doesn't make them morally or ethically right, it just means the guys with guns and badges are listening to them.

had acquired a round-up resistance trait, as have any number of weed species growing wild alongside roads in many places where canola is grown.

For a moment I must admit I had my doubts about that, having seen how that thing can wither a plant to death very quickly with just a few drops accidentally sprinkled (as opposed to much weaker herbicides such as gramoxone) and the fact that farmers usually use Round-up only to completely clear patches of land (or more recently, on those "round-up ready crops"), but damn that's right [nytimes.com].

Agreed. He was using Round Up on those crops.. a pesticide that kills unmodified crops, demonstrating that he knew what he was doing.

No, he wasn't using Round-Up on those crops. The Court specifically ruled [wikipedia.org] that he didn't have to pay Monsanto any damages because he did not use Round Up on his crops, and therefore did not benefit from using Monsanto's patent without a license. He only noticed it was Round-Up resistant because he sprayed Round-Up in an adjacent ditch to kill weeds which were getting close to his crop. Some Canola which was also growing in the ditch survived the Round-Up. He never used Round-Up on his crop fields.

It is the use of Round Up on Round Up Ready crops which is what the patent describes and what the farmer was violating.

No, that was a miscarriage of justice. Monsanto argued that even though Schmeiser had no way of knowing the crop's Round-Up resistance was due to carrying the Monsanto gene, he should have known that was the reason why some of the canola survived being sprayed with Round-Up. The Court bought this argument [fct-cf.gc.ca] hook, line, and sinker:

"I find that in 1998 Mr. Schmeiser planted canola seed saved from his 1997 crop in his field number 2 which seed he knew or ought to have known was Roundup tolerant, and that seed was the primary source for seeding and for the defendants' crops in all nine fields of canola in 1998."

That quote from the decision contains a glaring assumption which has since been proven false. The court assumed (accepting Monsanto's argument without question) that the only way for a plant to be resistant to Round-Up was for it to contain Monsanto's patented gene. It has since been shown [slashdot.org] that plants can develop a natural resistance to Round-Up. Therefore, the Court erred in ruling that Mr. Schmeiser "ought to have known" that the plants which resisted Round-Up spraying contained Monsanto's patented gene. In light of the development of Round-Up resistance in weeds, we now know that short of extensive genetic testing, there was no way to Mr. Schmeiser to have known whether the resistance was natural or came from Monsanto's patented gene.

While widely derided, the "McDonald's Hot Coffee" case was nowhere near as ridiculous as people have made it out to be. The woman received 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body. Her immediate medical bills for her needed skin grafts and hospital care (proven later in court) were $11,000.

She was more than reasonable about it, and initially asked McDonald's for only $20,000 to cover her hospital bills and other expenses. McDonald's flatly refused. Further attempts to negotiate met with nothing but stonewall

I think that was the parent poster's point...the Schmeiser case was blown way out of what it actually was by people who, quite frankly, have no clue what they're talking about, and can't be bothered to look up the facts, and even when they're presented with them, just stick to the old, overly simplified, good guy/bad guy story anyway. So, it is very equivalent to what you're saying about the hot coffee case.

While widely derided, the "McDonald's Hot Coffee" case was nowhere near as ridiculous as people have made it out to be. The woman received 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body. Her immediate medical bills for her needed skin grafts and hospital care (proven later in court) were $11,000.
She was more than reasonable about it, and initially asked McDonald's for only $20,000 to cover her hospital bills and other expenses. McDonald's flatly refused..

None of this changes the fact that coffee should be served hot, and that it was her own stupidity that caused the damage. Would you put your coffee cup between your legs at home, and sue the one who made the coffee if you spilled? Serving cold coffee avoids the problem, true, but people like hot coffee and hot foods.

So here in Europe, most people I know still see this as a good example of ridiculous American legal practices... just as warnings that it could be dangerous to fall down from a ladder, so th

You don't serve close-to-boiling coffee at home either. That was the point. If you spill coffee in your lap at home, you don't need skin grafts.

McDonald's admitted that they served their coffee at nearly 200 degrees F. MUCH hotter than you would normally serve it. Their excuse was that they wanted the coffee to still be hot when people arrived at their destination.

Way to only tell part of the facts. I invite you and everyone else who thinks along those line to read the very nice summary available on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

A quick quote from that article:

Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote a unanimous 7th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion affirming dismissal of a similar lawsuit against coffeemaker manufacturer Bunn-O-Matic. The opinion noted that hot coffee (179 F (82 C) in this case) is not "unreasonably dangerous."The smell (and therefore the taste) of coffee depends heavily on the oi

I did NOT tell "just part of the story". The official policy of McDonald's (before they were found negligent) was to serve their coffee at nearly 200 degrees F. That's hotter than any sane person would drink it, because that can and does cause burns.

Yes, the woman put the coffee between her legs. But normally if you did that (at home for example) and you spilled, at most you would get a bit of a scald and have a little redness. Not large patches of 3rd degree burns. Get real.

In this case the patent is a typical across the board bullshit patent, that the software industry is so famous. They are patenting the idea, an idea that has already been publicly expressed upon many occasions prior to this, except no greedy self serving ass hat patented.

They are not patenting a single application of the but the whole concept for which there is of course prior art, the expression of that concept. Whilst they might be entitled to a patent for an actual application of the concept they are

Perhaps their position on the grants give them the ability to take the IP from the research.

Anyways, I'm curious to how this isn't obvious from general insects carrying virus' and other things or old school biological warfare. I mean if we were hurdling dead cows over the castle walls in medieval times in order to infect the populations during a siege, then isn't prior art somewhat already established? What's new and novel here besides using it to cure instead of infect? And outside of that, the entire conc

The filers of the patent are all employees of microsoft's blue-sky R&D labs (research.microsoft.com) in their "health and well being" section. They are not associated at all with microsoft product development, or with the Gates foundation, this is microsoft's attempt to replicate what Bell Labs or Xerox parc used to be like, and you can only hire that caliber of talent out of academia by letting them do whatever they want. Good gig if you can get it.
And they are, in fact, people who primarily do wo

My main question here is: why is Microsoft filing for these patents? They have been involved in biomedics, afaik, only on the software and infomatics side [google.com]. Bill Gates, through his foundation, is generously giving grants [nytimes.com] to many organizations doing promising research. I didn't realize that Microsoft was directly involved in the research side of things. Did they buy assignment rights to this research (and potential patent)? Develop it themselves? That, I think, is the bigger story for me — not that this patent has been filed for, but that it's MSFT that is the assignee.

I can't find a good reference (read: I am lazy), but I know the MS Basic Research Lab had been doing various bio/genetics stuff at one point. The MS Basic Research lab is (or at least was when I followed it more closely) basically the only true basic research lab left in the country, and one with enormously broad interests.

MSoftie: "The latest report is in. Our software is riddled with viruses. Bugs everywhere."Gates: "I thought we were the best at software! What's the meaning of this?!"MSoftie: "Apparently we are the best at viruses and bugs..."Gates: (ding!)

If (and it is a big if) Microsoft was succesful in moving just 50% of its enterprise customers to the cloud, their revenue would go up by approximately 400%. That's assuming no new products, no new releases and no increased penetration. Microsoft is growing in the not-so-low double digits year over year. I don't them as stagnant and the industry itself is growing faster than ever.

If (and it is a big if) Microsoft was succesful in moving just 50% of its enterprise customers to the cloud, their revenue would go up by approximately 400%.

You left out that they would have to convince enterprises to go with THEIR "clould" solution. Self-hosting your own client/server architecture in a data center is dirt cheap nowadays, and doesn't require a license from Microsoft.

That's assuming no new products, no new releases and no increased penetration. Microsoft is growing in the not-so-low double digits year over year. I don't them as stagnant and the industry itself is growing faster than ever.

The industry is changing. There won't ever be a "Year of the linux desktop", but there WILL be constant erosion, the same as there was never a "Year of the Firefox Web Browser", but Firefox somehow became the standard.

The genetically altered cows that produce cash are in the second round.

As a senior engagement manager at a consulting firm in the 90's, I once created an animated PowerPoint presentation that showed the customer literally as a cow, and the sales team as lions who came in to feast on its entrails after the technical staff knocked it over with dazzling technology. Money was pouring out of the cow as the sales people tore into it.

I got a standing ovation from the sales team. It occurred to no one that I was

As a senior engagement manager at a consulting firm in the 90's, I once created an animated PowerPoint presentation that showed the customer literally as a cow, and the sales team as lions who came in to feast on its entrails after the technical staff knocked it over with dazzling technology. Money was pouring out of the cow as the sales people tore into it.

Of course the immunisation implied by this patent would also be illegal because people have the right of refusal to any treatment and this patent of course denies that right. Then of course their are allergies, each allergen being pretty much unique to each human individual, such that any pharmacological treatment can have negative and even deadly results to a percentage of the population. So the problem becomes how can you target the treatment to only those people that accept it and avoid those people who

Various dubiously scientific(but, by luck or judgement, approximately correct) application of the principle of vaccination can be found going back a significant way. The canonical western example is Jenner's 1769 use of cowpox, which conveniently happens to be close enough to smallpox to generate immunity; but not close enough to be, well, smallpox. I'm fairly sure that there are various earlier examples of similar stuff that didn't get "text

Funny you should mention this... There was widespread talk about using 'white hat worms' to patch systems infected with Code Red and Nimda, both enabled by bugs in MS products. The idea was that it would remove and patch infected/compromised systems and inoculate systems that had not yet been targeted.

I'm pretty sure there have been ideas floated around to distribute vaccines through alternate means similar to what MS is trying to patent.

This is not the type of thing to be fooling with at this stage in technology. Until we understand things better it wont be safe to do this. Nature has a way of surviving in unusual and surprising ways. Besides Microsoft, seriously even if you arent a mac user you would not put something in your body from this company with a history of poor quality and security problems in its software not to mention an emphasis on making money rather than making a quality product that makes money because it is good they make a mediocre one and people use it because they don't know any better or think they have no choice. Frankly even if Apple were to do this type of thing (which they wont) i would not mess with it anyway because they are a computer and software company. IBM Nanomachines? There is something dangerous from a company that actually specializes in such things is on the cutting edge of development and knows what the hell they are doing.

I'm pretty sure that having two mosquito-transmitted diseases is, in fact, worse than our current situation of having one. Unless your goal happens to be fixing overpopulation, in which case it's perfect.

There is already a large host of naturally-occurring mosquito-borne illnesses out there: malaria is just the most famous. There's dengue fever, yellow fever, filariasis, West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis, etc., and most of these diseases are at least as deadly as malaria. Whether or not adding one more will make things any worse than they already are depends on the characteristics of the disease being spread, and the characteristics of the mosquitoes spreading the disease (e.g. if they have wider ran

Man - now you have no choice whether or not you want to be exposed to a vaccine. As someone who is allergic to a common ingredient in medications/vaccines this makes me really nervous... What will happen to people who have bad reactions to the new modified parasites? If you want to give people vaccines, give them the choice to receive them in a traditional injection. It is probably cheaper (at least in the short term) than properly developing and testing new types of parasites. I am actually quite irritated

Chances are you are allergic to something that's in the vaccine but is not the actual vaccine part - say, the adjuvant. Then, you can be sure those bug-induced "vaccines" would not elicit an allergic reaction, since no such thing would be present in the bite. You'd get the weakened/defective contaminant and what normally is in there (anti-coagulant, etc.). If you're not allergic to bugs normally, you shouldn't have any more of a reaction, from what I gather (though IANAP).

I'm not quite sure why this was assigned to MS; I'm aware that the Gates foundation [wikipedia.org] is doing work in this arena, but why they'd want to file a patent on it is unclear and using MS to do so is downright weird.

Side note - slight irony in the fact the favicon for the website is the (now obsolete) Sun logo on an MS patent;)

I'm not quite sure why this was assigned to MS; I'm aware that the Gates foundation [wikipedia.org] is doing work in this arena, but why they'd want to file a patent on it is unclear and using MS to do so is downright weird.

Why are you confused? It's been clear since its inception that the Gates Foundation is the propaganda wing of Microsoft.

Even more indications that Microsoft (and all other proprietary software vendors) have nothing worth to patent in the software sphere to gain economic advantage... so they expand their field of "view."

Microsoft how is that pact with Oracle/Apple/EMC going? C or D planed yet?

Screw-worms were irradiated so that they would be sterile, mate with screw-worms that weren't sterile, and produce no offspring. This as almost 50 years ago. Theidea of using radiation to interrupt the reproductive vectors is not patentable.

Also, what could possibly go wrong with genetically modifying organisms which will then interact with a human body? Yes, tech fear etc. But I am not sure I want to be a testing bed for the stuff that will inevitably survive.

After all these years, anyone trusting Microsoft to avoid risk because it has "bug recovery" that it promises will be a perfect failsafe deserves to die a slow, horrible death.

If we let Microsoft directly go and mutate bugs to unleash on the world, we will deserve to suffer into extinction. They're cutting out the middleman, and going directly to live, stinging, buggy bugs, for crying out loud!

Because mosquitoes don't have a limit on how many bacteria they can carry. They don't want to find out that the same GM mosquito that carries the cure to malaria also is an ideal host to carry say, AIDS or EBOLA, or the Bubonic Plague.

Of course, this is in reality not much more likely than a random mosquito developing the ability to carry those diseases. But it is an intelligent feature to add on to almost all GM creatures, at least until we develop significant experience in handling them.

Just keep in mind that Jurassic Park doesn't demonstrate that nature finds its way, it just claims so. In fact, the movie had to resort to the fact that Hammond had used frog DNA to complete the missing pieces, which gave the dinosaurs the ability to change sex when needed, which would be absurd considering that frogs are the last animals you would go for when trying to complete a dinosaur's genome. Also, sex change in an adult dinosaur would be physiologically impossible, unlike in a frog. So don't confuse

Birds can "almost" change their sex.Dinosaurs are a bit lower on the evolutionary tree.I wouldn't declare dinos unable to do this, until i've seen their full genome. (And years of studying biology). Obviously Jurassic Park doesn't demonstrate anything, it is not a documentary.